Authors: Paul Sperry
The FBI would never actually respect any of CAIR’s churlish wishes, would it? It would never give in to such demands at the expense of an investigation, right? Think again.
In 2004, for instance, the FBI raided an Islamic “cultural center” in a northern Virginia suburb on suspicions of terrorist activity. But before agents executed the search warrant, the FBI foolishly told CAIR that the raid was going to take place so that CAIR officials could be on site to monitor the conduct and sensitivity of agents.
By the time agents showed up at the Saudi-controlled Institute for Islamic and Arabic Sciences in America in Merrifield, Virginia, the building was practically an “empty box,” as one investigator described it.
“By the time we went in, the place was sterile. They’d cleaned it out,” adds the senior investigator, who works with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in Washington. “It was bad. It was really bad.”
What happened? “They were warned by CAIR that we were coming to do a search warrant,” explains the law enforcement official, who helped execute the search warrant. “We were pissed. It was obvious to us they knew we were coming.”
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Who got the courtesy call from the FBI that morning? The same CAIR official cited earlier—CAIR-MD/VA executive director Rizwan Mowlana—who’d assigned the “sister in Islam” to coach the Maryland mosque president and help obstruct the FBI’s questioning of him.
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“Being well-networked among the interfaith, law enforcement, and political leadership in your area allows you to be informed of many events before they happen,” CAIR advises staff in training seminars.
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The outreach strategy has paid off royally for CAIR and its terrorist constituents.
HUNT FOR EL-SHUKRIJUMAH
Consider also the case of al-Qaida operative Adnan el-Shukrijumah, the Saudi-born son of a Florida mosque leader who’d once served as a translator for the Blind Sheik, Omar Abdel Rahman. After the FBI added el-Shukrijumah, aka Jaffar the Pilot, to the most-wanted terrorist list as potentially “another Mohamed Atta,” a national manhunt ensued.
Fairfax County police were heavily involved in the hunt because some of el-Shukrijumah’s relatives—including a sister and a brother—lived in Herndon, Virginia, where CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood have a strong presence. Even though police suspected el-Shukrijumah, a naturalized U.S. citizen, visited the area, they say the Muslim community there completely clammed up when they asked about his whereabouts.
“We went around to their employers around Herndon and showed pictures of their brother who’s wanted, and miraculously, nobody ever saw him,” says the high-ranking Fairfax County police official. Oddly, his family members claimed they had no phone number or address for him, and they couldn’t explain why they kept no personal contact information for him.
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One time, Fairfax County police found el-Shukrijumah’s father staying in Herndon. “We caught him back up here staying with the daughter when everybody was looking for his son,” the official says. “Wouldn’t you know he didn’t know where he was either.”
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The father, an
imam
who received regular stipends from the Saudi embassy before passing away in 2004, strenuously denied his son has terrorism ties.
Desperate, authorities turned to CAIR in Washington and Florida to help get the word out to the Muslim community about the search. CAIR complied, while also issuing press statements holding up the el-Shukrijumah family as a pillar of the community and praising it for its cooperation—even as the suspected al-Qaida terrorist’s mother and father made their own statements proclaiming their son’s innocence and suggesting he should remain in hiding. El-Shukrijumah’s parents even tipped him off that the FBI was asking questions about him when they spoke with him by phone.
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CAIR at the same time pooh-poohed el-Shukrijumah’s connections to al-Qaida, suggesting the FBI had exaggerated the danger he poses.
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THE GUYANA BUNCH
In a related development, recently declassified U.S. Muslim Brotherhood documents reveal that the Brotherhood in America—which is led in part by CAIR’s founders—has established operations in, of all places, the South American country of Guyana.
El-Shukrijumah happens to have been raised in Guyana, and some suspect he may be hiding there, if not in Pakistan.
Brotherhood leaders over the past couple of decades have sent money to Guyana to support an unnamed
imam
and his mosque, and an unidentified “institute,” according to one document.
They’ve also traveled to Guyana to visit the “Guyana brothers,” but it’s not immediately known if any of them had contacts with the el-Shukrijumahs while traveling there. Known among al-Qaida operatives as “the South American,” el-Shukrijumah has a Guyanese passport, as well as possibly a Trinidadian passport. His late father, Sheik Gulshair, was born in Guyana and worked there as a Muslim missionary, helping to establish a mosque with Saudi funding. He also has aunts and uncles who still live in the country.
In that same, little-noticed Brotherhood document listing the 1991-1992 goals of its “South America Committee” (which includes the Caribbean), the final item on the list—goal No. 169—reads: “Organizing the Caribbean group in cooperation with Sh. New York.”
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Sh. is a common abbreviation for sheik, and investigators believe the cryptic reference to “Sh. New York” may refer to the Blind Sheik, the convicted terrorist who at that time was in Brooklyn plotting to blow up the World Trade Center and other New York landmarks. Or possibly el-Shukrijumah’s father himself, who was assigned to the Blind Sheik’s mosque in Brooklyn to do translation work for him in the early ’90s. He was commonly known among the Brothers as “Sheikh Gulshair.”
Also recall that CAIR founder Omar Ahmad embraced and hosted the Blind Sheik at his home during this same period in which he and the Brotherhood wrote their South American plan. And during a 2001 staffwide CAIR meeting, internal notes reveal that Ahmad suggested stepping up CAIR’s “Guyanese” outreach operations.
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These connections beg the question: How close are CAIR’s leaders to the el-Shukrijumahs? And how much do they know about Adnan el-Shukrijumah’s travels and contacts? Have they disclosed all they know to authorities?
These are critical questions because the U.S. government has fingered the street-smart el-Shukrijumah as the ultimate al-Qaida “sleeper agent,” and a cell leader potentially more dangerous than even 9/11 ringleader Atta. In fact, he’s said to have been handpicked by 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to carry out an encore plot to detonate nuclear devices in several U.S. cities simultaneously.
El-Shukrijumah remains at large, however, thanks in part to a lack of cooperation from the Muslim community, investigators say.
‘UMMAH FIRST’
The senior Fairfax County police official offers that while detectives have received help from Muslim leaders solving crimes such as bank robberies, terrorism is another story.
“We have gone to them and said, ‘Hey, we want to know about the bad uncle from Baghdad. You know, tell us about that stuff,’” he says. “And they have cooperated with us.”
“For instance,” he says, “we had an Egyptian bank robber, and they helped us find the bank robber and bring him in.”
But he says when it comes to ratting out jihadist
s
in their midst, forget it. The Muslim Brotherhood-controlled mosques brainwash adherents to think spying on a Muslim for a non-Muslim is nothing less than
kufr
—or betrayal—and that Allah, in turn, will betray them on Judgment Day.
“Most of our [terrorism] leads are generated, or they’re created. They’re not walk-ins,” the police official says. “They’re not walking in and going, ‘You know what? This isn’t right. I’m an American first, and these people at my mosque are up to no good.’”
“No,” he adds, “it doesn’t happen.”
He explains that Brotherhood leaders never let the faithful forget that their religion must trump any loyalty to country.
“It’s the
ummah
first,” he says, referring to the Arabic term for the global nation, or brotherhood, of Muslims.
Even when police get Muslim suspects in custody, it’s hard to get them to talk. “We have flipped people,” the official says, “but only after appealing to their darker angels” by threatening incarceration or deportation.
“They come around, but it’s always kicking and screaming,” he adds. “Or it’s because they’re not quite believing that there’s seventy-two virgins waiting for them” in Paradise if they refuse to cooperate and rot as martyrs in prison.
While it’s not impossible to develop sources in the Muslim community, the official cautions that “you have to make sure they’re not doubled, and that they’re not going to sell you out.”
The high risk of Muslims double-crossing authorities makes recruiting good informants exceptionally difficult. And in lieu of trusted Muslim informants, they’ve had to resort to infiltrating mosques with undercover agents and non-Muslim informants posing as Muslims.
This practice, of course, has sent Muslim groups like CAIR and ISNA into high dudgeon. In fact, ISNA claims to have met this spring with FBI officials to formally complain about the FBI planting a spy in the Islamic Center of Irvine, California.
The spy helped the agency gather information about a brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden’s chief bodyguard, Ahmadullah Niazi. According to the Associated Press, that spy “recorded Niazi on multiple occasions talking about blowing up buildings, acquiring weapons, and sending money to the Afghan
mujahideen
.”
Never mind that, harrumphs ISNA. Mosques are sacred ground—inviolable. “The mosques are our communities’ most valued assets,” ISNA asserts, “and we will work to protect them.”
CAIR also huffed about the FBI sending in an “agent provocateur” to the Irvine mosque and others in the area, claiming the move has rekindled American Muslims’ “feelings of anger” and “mistrust” toward the FBI.
“Infiltrating mainstream mosques the way FBI informants infiltrate white supremacist groups illustrates the FBI’s perception of American Muslims as a community that must be constantly monitored, instead of being treated as an equal partner in fighting crime and terrorism,” it said in a prepared statement.
Once again, the Islamic supremacists at CAIR merely demonstrate they care more about protecting a mosque (that’s hardly “mainstream”) than helping the FBI prevent a massive attack on a shopping mall by a known al-Qaida operative using that mosque as a terror sanctuary and recruiting ground. The Islamic Center of Irvine is partnered with the Islamic Center of Orange County, a Muslim Brotherhood mosque that groomed Adam Gadahn, the “American al-Qaida” who’s wanted by the FBI for treason.
CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper warns that monitoring Muslims will only alienate “the very people whose help is necessary in the war on terrorism.”
But such patriotic-sounding rhetoric has proved empty, and the FBI is no longer buying it.
CAIR’S PROTECTION RACKET
CAIR never fails to advertise how it’s tried to partner with the FBI to help agents combat terrorism. But behind the scenes, they train Muslims not to talk to the FBI and not to inform on fellow Muslims who may be involved in violent activities against the U.S. They’ve put up a protective shield around the entire Muslim community in America to keep law enforcement out—and terrorists operating in the shadows.
“Why don’t they tell us where they’ve provided all this information that’s kept us safe, because it just hasn’t happened,” the senior FBI officer in Washington says. “It’s a total fabrication.”
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In fact, it’s more likely CAIR has
withheld
information. CAIR’s internal records show its executives have personally received correspondence from Muslim extremists threatening violence, and kept mum about it.
In 2007, for example, executive director Awad received a two-page fax marked “urgent” from an angry CAIR member threatening “to use force” against America and Israel to avenge what he called the “murder” of the Palestinian people by “those Zionist criminals.” He begged Awad and CAIR to demand an end to Israeli “crimes” “before I respond with force.”
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Equally wary of CAIR are the Fairfax County police, who are behind many of the big terrorism busts made along northern Virginia’s so-called Wahhabi Corridor. Department officials say it’s clear the group and its partners like ISNA are only pretending to cooperate with law enforcement to catch terrorists.
“I don’t trust any of them,” says the high-ranking Fairfax police official.
In fact, their efforts at outreach are more than likely part of a Muslim Brotherhood ploy to spy on law enforcement. “It says in their founding documents that they do outreach in order to keep tabs on the government,” the FBI official says.
Indeed, according to one document found at a Muslim Brotherhood safehouse in Virginia, monitoring the FBI is a key function of the various front groups to secure the U.S. Brotherhood network against such “outside dangers.”
In the document, Muslim Brotherhood leader Zeid al-Noman describes strategies they use to gather intelligence to thwart law enforcement investigations. “For instance,” he says, “monitoring the government bodies—such as the CIA, FBI, etc.—so that we find out if they are monitoring us [and] how can we get rid of them.”
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